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Following the crash of the US Airways A320 into the Hudson river, the word "miracle" has been bandied about a lot by survivors and the press alike.

To use the word "miracle" in a situation like this just denigrates and belittles the pilot and crew. The pilot was trained for birdstrikes and emergency landings. Granted not on water, but he was a veteran pilot doing his job and doing it well. It's why airlines train pilots in simulators like those I help to build.

The crew were trained to get people off in the event of an emergency and they did so quickly and skillfully.

It was the job of the aircraft to protect its occupants as best it could, which it sort of did, not to mention that it stayed afloat, and it's detachable slide / life rafts worked like a charm.

It makes me proud to know that something I am involved in making helped train the pilot to save the lives of all those people. There was no "miracle" about it, much less anything to do with anyon…

After a lot of annoying procedure, Winblows 7 is now running on a second partition on my second PC. I'm blogging from it right now. You know something? It doesn't entirely suck. It's noticably less sluggish than Vista although a lot of the "security" stuff is still incredibly annoying when coming from XP. Most entertaining thing so far : it takes longer to calculate the time to copy a bunch of files than it actually takes to perform the copy.

I'm persevering with this Windows 7 thing. I've got to the point now where it won't boot my machine because it's trying to output a graphics mode that neither of my PCs will support (neither the ATI nor the Nvidia card). This is after a long and drawn out battle just to get the damned DVD image to even boot.

Some further investigation reveals that it won't run the digital outputs on either video card during the install process. I've had to find an old DVI to analog adapter and run the analog outputs instead.

Eesh. If it's this bad just trying to install the damned thing, what's it going to be like if it ever boots?

This does rather explain why the alarmists changed the term "global warming" to "climate change". The facts do rather fly in the face of the fiction peddled by the same people who told us we would all be dead by now because of the hole in the ozone layer....

Mind you, these are the same people who refuse to accept a 20 year cycle or that the ice packs melt and refreeze in the same cycle. Far be it from me to question NOAA figures - after all I do sort of like data rather than conjecture. Can you spot the 20 year cycle?

Given the disaster that was Windows Vista, and given that Micro$oft have opened up the Winblows 7 beta to everyone, you'd think it would be a good first impression if it downloaded properly.

Sadly, it doesn't - well not unless you've got Internet Explorer 7 or 8. Well, when I made the mistake of installing IE7 a while back, I got nothing but popups and popunders from dozens of Micro$oft "affiliates" wanting me to download extras. Plus it hijacked all my image associations, search preferences, start page and browser defaults. I've not touched the thing since. Waste of time.

It boggles the mind how Micro$oft can just continue to make one colossal blunder after another. Not supporting Firefox on their download service isn't exactly going to endear them to skeptics.

I thought the whole point of this exercise was to try to get people on board early. Gotta tell you - not working....

Today was a big ski day in more than one sense of the word. Right off the bat I had a huge yard sale and screwed up my left wrist by landing on it funny. Getting back on the proverbial horse, I went on to ski the Summit lift three times and Powderhorn twice. Mike M was with me today too, decked out in full 80's ski gear complete with ultra-long planks of wood, which I'm told were the thing to have back in the day ...